The economic policy of Soviet Russia in the twenties of the last century, which included a return to commodity-money relations, freedom of trade and the replacement of surplus appropriation with an agricultural tax.
New economic policy was carried out by the Soviet authorities from 1921 to 1928 with the aim of leading the country out of the crisis, developing the economy and agriculture.
After the First World War and the Civil War, the RSFSR faced famine, political and economic crisis. A wave of uprisings against Soviet power swept across the country - on the Don, in Siberia, in the Kuban, in Tambov and Kronstadt. In the spring of 1921, 200 thousand people were involved in the uprisings. Despite the fact that the uprisings and rebellions were suppressed, the Soviet government needed a change in the model of governing the country. It was decided to introduce a system that would combine economic liberalization and tight political control.
The reasons for the introduction of the new economic policy can be divided into:
The New Economic Policy was a market-administrative structure, which was characterized by:
The transition to a new economic policy required a reform of the financial and monetary system, which consisted in:
By a government decree of October 4, 1921, payment for telegraph and transport services was introduced, the State Bank was established, and savings and loan banks were opened.
In November 1922, in accordance with the decree of the Council of People's Commissars, the issuance of a parallel currency began - a gold piece, which was equated to one spool - 7.75 grams of gold. Chervonets were designed to serve wholesale trade, credit operations of the State Bank and industry. In 1923 and 1924, two devaluations of the calculated monetary unit which made it possible to give the reform a confiscatory character. In 1924 monetary system with two parallel currencies was eliminated.
The formation of a new monetary system was accompanied by the development of foreign, wholesale and retail trade, the elimination budget deficit, revision of prices, creation of stock exchanges and joint-stock banks. A solid national currency and a deficit-free budget were the most important achievements of the financial reform.
New economic policy in agriculture led to:
The replacement of the surplus appropriation with an agricultural tax was fixed on legislative level in March 1921 by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Compared with the surplus appraisal, the amount of the tax is halved, but the decree limited the freedom of trade in products left after the payment of the tax. The agricultural market did not fulfill its functions, since the peasants were forced to sell half of the products below the market price. The state exploited the peasants, and corruption and theft of state property by officials was widespread. Despite the fact that during the period of the New Economic Policy the potential of agriculture was used irrationally, and the peasants were not interested in the development of the industry, in 1925 the area under crops reached the pre-war level.
The basis of the NEP in industry was the abolition of central administrations and the creation of trusts that gained complete financial and economic independence. Enterprises that are part of the trusts lost state supplies and purchased resources for open market. The introduction of cost accounting allowed enterprises of all forms of ownership to independently manage their income.
The state, in order to build a socialist planned economy, tried to combine two types of trust management - planned and market. This was the main complexity and inconsistency of the situation. The state strengthened the principle of planning and encouraged the creation of concerns by combining trusts with enterprises producing raw materials and finished products.
Simultaneously with the trusts, syndicates were created - associations of trusts for mutual lending, regulation of trade operations in the market and wholesale sales of products. In 1922, 80% of the trusts were syndicates.
During the period of the new economic policy, a large role in the restoration of food and light industry the private sector played - it produced 20% of industrial products, and its share in retail trade was 83%.
Industry in the private sector was represented by rental, handicraft, cooperative and joint-stock enterprises. Private entrepreneurship has become widespread in the clothing, leather, food and shag industries. Despite the fact that the state, using tax pressure, regularly restricted the activities of private traders, there were 325 thousand private enterprises in the RSFSR, which employed 12% of the country's workforce.
The NEP allowed the state to restore the destroyed economy in the absence of highly qualified personnel that were lost during the First World War and the Civil War. The recovery and high growth rates of the economy were achieved through the commissioning of pre-war capacities.
The potential for further development of the economy turned out to be too low. After all, representatives of the private sector were not allowed to lead positions, they were not welcome foreign investment and the country could not afford long-term capital-intensive investment. The implementation of the new economic policy without the participation of experienced production workers, managers and economists has become the main cause of serious mistakes and miscalculations.
New economic policy(abbr. NEP or NEP) - economic policy pursued in the 1920s in Soviet Russia.
It was adopted on March 14, 1921 by the X Congress RKP(b), replacing the policy of "military communism" carried out during the Civil War, which led Russia to economic decline. The new economic policy was aimed at introducing private enterprise and reviving market relations, with the restoration of the national economy. The NEP was a forced measure and largely an improvisation. However, in the seven years of its existence, it has become one of the most successful economic projects Soviet period. The main content of the NEP is the replacement of food surplus tax in the countryside (up to 70% of grain was confiscated with food tax, about 30% with food tax), the use of the market and various forms of ownership, the attraction of foreign capital in the form of concessions, the implementation of monetary reform (1922-1924), in as a result of which the ruble became a convertible currency.
The Soviet state faced the problems of financial stabilization, and, therefore, the suppression of inflation and the achievement of a balanced state budget. The strategy of the state, aimed at surviving in conditions of a credit blockade, determined the primacy of the USSR in compiling production balances and distributing products. The new economic policy was state regulation mixed economy using planned and market mechanisms. The NEP was based on the ideas of the works of V. I. Lenin, discussions about the theory of reproduction and money, the principles of pricing, finance and credit.
The NEP made it possible to quickly restore the national economy, destroyed by the First World War and the Civil War.
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✪ USSR during the NEP. Video lesson on the history of Russia Grade 11
✪ New economic policy | History of Russia #22 | info lesson
✪ The crisis of Soviet power in 1921 and the transition to the NEP. Video lesson on the history of Russia Grade 11
✪ New economic policy | History of Russia Grade 11 #11 | info lesson
✪ 053. History of Russia. XX century. NEP
By 1921, the RSFSR was literally in ruins. From the former Russian Empire came the territories of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Western Belarus, Western Ukraine, and Bessarabia. According to experts, the population in the remaining territories barely reached 135 million. During the hostilities, the Donbass, the Baku oil region, the Urals and Siberia were especially affected, many mines and mines were destroyed. Factories stopped due to lack of fuel and raw materials. The workers were forced to leave the cities and go to the countryside. The volume of industrial production has significantly decreased, and as a result, agricultural production as well.
Society has degraded, its intellectual potential has significantly weakened. Most of the Russian intelligentsia was destroyed or left the country.
In this way, the main task The internal policy of the RCP (b) and the Soviet state consisted in restoring the destroyed economy, creating a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building socialism, promised by the Bolsheviks to the people.
The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over grain, but also rose to armed struggle. The uprisings swept the Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, the Volga region and Siberia. Units of the Red Army were sent to suppress these demonstrations.
Discontent spread to the army as well. On March 1, 1921, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan " For Soviets without communists!"demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom speech, assembly and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy, that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation.
From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt:
Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army soldiers clearly see at the present moment that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and lead the republic out of the impasse...
Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities launched an assault on Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.
In connection with the introduction of the NEP, certain legal guarantees were introduced for private property. So, on May 22, 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a decree “On the main private property rights recognized by the RSFSR, protected by its laws and protected by the courts of the RSFSR. Then, by a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 11, 1922, from January 1, 1923, the Civil Code of the RSFSR was put into effect, which, in particular, provided that every citizen has the right to organize industrial and trade enterprises.
The task of the first stage of the monetary reform, implemented within the framework of one of the directions of the economic policy of the state, was the stabilization of the monetary and credit relations of the USSR with other countries. After carrying out two denominations, as a result of which 1 million rubles were the same banknotes was equated to 1 ruble with new state marks, a parallel circulation of depreciating state marks was introduced to serve small trade and hard chervonets, backed by precious metals, stable foreign currency and easily marketable goods. Chervonets was equal to the old 10-ruble gold coin containing 7.74 grams of pure gold.
It is necessary, however, to note the fact that wealthy peasants were taxed according to higher rates. Thus, on the one hand, an opportunity was given to improve well-being, but on the other, there was no point in expanding the economy too much. All this taken together led to the "average" of the village. The well-being of the peasants as a whole has increased in comparison with the pre-war level, the number of poor and rich has decreased, and the proportion of middle peasants has increased.
However, even such a half-hearted reform gave certain results, and by 1926 the food supply had improved significantly.
The holding (1921-1929) of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, the largest in Russia, was resumed.
In general, the New Economic Policy had a beneficial effect on the state of the countryside. First, the peasants had an incentive to work. Secondly (compared to pre-revolutionary times), many have increased land allotment - the main means of production.
The country needed money - to maintain the army, to restore industry, to support the world revolutionary movement. In a country where 80% of the population was peasantry, the main burden of the tax burden fell on him. But the peasantry was not rich enough to provide all the needs of the state, the necessary tax revenues. Increased taxation on especially wealthy peasants also did not help, so from the mid-1920s, other, non-tax methods of replenishing the treasury began to be actively used, such as forced loans and underpriced grain and overpriced industrial goods. As a result, industrial goods, if we calculate their value in poods of wheat, turned out to be several times more expensive than before the war, despite their lower quality. A phenomenon was formed, which, with the light hand of Trotsky, began to be called "price scissors". The peasants reacted simply - they stopped selling grain in excess of what they needed to pay taxes. The first crisis in the sale of manufactured goods arose in the autumn of 1923. Peasants needed plows and other industrial products, but refused to buy them at inflated prices. The next crisis arose in the financial year 1924-1925 (that is, in the autumn of 1924 - in the spring of 1925). The crisis was called "procurement" because the procurement amounted to only two-thirds of the expected level. Finally, in the 1927-1928 business year - new crisis: failed to collect even the most necessary.
So, by 1925, it became clear that the national economy had come to a contradiction: political and ideological factors, the fear of the “degeneration” of power, prevented further progress towards the market; the return to the military-communist type of economy was hampered by memories of the peasant war of 1920 and mass famine, the fear of anti-Soviet speeches.
Cooperation of all forms and types developed rapidly. The role of production cooperatives in agriculture was insignificant (in 1927 they provided only 2% of all agricultural products and 7% of marketable products), but the simplest primary forms - marketing, supply and credit cooperation - by the end of the 1920s covered more than half of all peasant farms. By the end of 1928. 28 million people were involved in non-production cooperation of various types, primarily peasant, (13 times more than in 1913). In the socialized retail trade, 60-80% accounted for the cooperative and only 20-40% - for the state proper, in industry in 1928, 13% of all products were produced by cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, insurance.
Instead of depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of the Soviet signs, in 1922, the release of a new monetary unit was launched - chervonets, which had a gold content and a gold exchange rate (1 chervonets = 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles = 7.74 grams of pure gold). In 1924, the Soviet signs, which were quickly supplanted by the chervonets, ceased to be printed altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; in the same year, the budget was balanced and the use of money emission to cover state expenses was prohibited; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On the foreign exchange market both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 American dollar= 1.94 rubles).
The credit system has revived. In 1921, the State Bank of the RSFSR was created (transformed in 1923 into the State Bank of the USSR), which began lending to industry and trade on commercial basis. In 1922-1925, a number of specialized banks were created: joint stock, in which the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, were shareholders, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; organized on the shares of the agricultural credit society, closed on the republican and central agricultural banks; societies mutual credit - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the savings of the population. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the share of the State Bank in the total credit investments of the entire banking system was 2/3. By October 1, 1926, the number of banks increased to 61, and the share of the State Bank in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.
Commodity-money relations, which were previously tried to be banished from production and exchange, in the 1920s penetrated into all the pores of the economic organism, became the main link between its individual parts.
In just 5 years, from 1921 to 1926, the index industrial production increased by more than 3 times; agricultural production doubled and exceeded the level of 1913 by 18%. But even after the end of the recovery period, economic growth continued at a rapid pace: in 1927 and 1928, the growth in industrial production amounted to 13 and 19%, respectively. In general, for the period 1921-1928, the average annual growth rate of the national income was 18%.
The most important result of the NEP was that impressive economic successes were achieved on the basis of fundamentally new, hitherto unknown to the history of social relations. In industry, key positions were occupied by state trusts; financial sector- state and cooperative banks, in agriculture - small peasant farms covered by the simplest types of cooperation. They turned out to be completely new in the conditions of NEP and economic functions states; the goals, principles and methods of government economic policy have changed radically. If earlier the center directly established natural, technological proportions of reproduction by order, now it has switched to price regulation, trying to ensure balanced growth by indirect, economic methods.
The state put pressure on producers, forced them to find internal reserves to increase profits, to mobilize efforts to increase the efficiency of production, which alone could now ensure profit growth.
A broad campaign to lower prices was launched by the government as early as the end of 1923, but a truly comprehensive regulation of price proportions began in 1924, when circulation completely switched to a stable red currency, and the functions of the Internal Trade Commission were transferred to the People's Commissariat of Internal Trade with broad rights in the field of rationing prices. The measures taken then were successful: wholesale prices for manufactured goods fell by 26% from October 1923 to May 1, 1924 and continued to decline further.
Throughout the subsequent period until the end of the NEP, the question of prices continued to be the core of the state economic policy: raising them by trusts and syndicates threatened to repeat the sales crisis, while lowering them beyond measure when existing along with the state-owned private sector inevitably led to the enrichment of the private trader at the expense of state industry, to the transfer of resources from state enterprises to private industry and trade. The private market, where prices were not standardized, but were set as a result of the free play of supply and demand, served as a sensitive “barometer”, the “arrow” of which, as soon as the state made miscalculations in pricing policy, immediately “pointed to bad weather”.
But the regulation of prices was carried out by the bureaucracy, which was not controlled sufficiently by the direct producers. The lack of democracy in the decision-making process regarding pricing has become the “Achilles heel” of the market socialist economy and played a fatal role in the fate of the NEP.
Brilliant as the economic successes were, their recovery was limited by hard limits. It was not easy to reach the pre-war level, but even this meant a new clash with the backwardness of yesterday's Russia, now already isolated and surrounded by a hostile world. At the end of 1917, the US government terminated trade relations with Soviet Russia, and in 1918, the governments of England and France. In October 1919, the Supreme Council of the Entente announced a complete ban on all forms of economic ties with Soviet Russia. As a result of the failure of the intervention against the Soviet Republic and the growth of contradictions in the economies of the imperialist countries themselves, the Entente states were forced to lift the blockade (January 1920). foreign states tried to organize the so-called. a gold blockade, refusing to accept Soviet gold as a means of payment, and a little later, a credit blockade, refusing to provide loans to the USSR.
Economic processes during the NEP period were superimposed on political development and were largely determined by the latter. These processes throughout the entire period of Soviet power were characterized by an inclination towards dictatorship and authoritarianism. As long as Lenin was at the helm, one could speak of a "collective dictatorship"; he was a leader solely due to authority, however, since 1917, he had to share this role with L. Trotsky: the supreme ruler at that time was called “Lenin and Trotsky”, both portraits adorned not only state institutions, but sometimes peasant huts. However, with the beginning of the intra-party struggle at the end of 1922, Trotsky's rivals - Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin - not having his authority, opposed Lenin's authority to him and in short term inflated it to a real cult - in order to gain the opportunity to proudly be called "faithful Leninists" and "defenders of Leninism."
This was especially dangerous when combined with the dictatorship of the Communist Party. As Mikhail Tomsky, one of the top Soviet leaders, said in April 1922, “We have several parties. But, unlike abroad, we have one party in power, and the rest are in prison.” As if to confirm his words, in the summer of that year open process over the right SRs. All more or less major representatives of this party who remained in the country were tried - and more than a dozen sentences were handed down to capital punishment (later the convicts were pardoned). In the same 1922, more than two hundred of the largest representatives of Russian philosophical thought were sent abroad just because they did not hide their disagreement with the Soviet system - this measure went down in history under the name "Philosophical Steamboat".
Discipline within the Communist Party itself was also tightened. At the end of 1920, an opposition group appeared in the party - the "workers' opposition", which demanded the transfer of all power in production to the trade unions. In order to stop such attempts, the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921 adopted a resolution on the unity of the party. According to this resolution, the decisions taken by the majority must be carried out by all members of the party, including those who do not agree with them.
The consequence of the one-party system was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in the party (Politburo) and in government bodies(SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to take urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (VTsIK), but in the government - the Council of People's Commissars.
All these processes led to the fact that the actual position of a person, his authority played a greater role in the 1920s than his place in the formal structure of state power. That is why, speaking about the figures of the 1920s, we first of all name not positions, but surnames.
In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the rebirth of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be many more people wishing to join the ruling party than an underground party, membership in which cannot give other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling one, began to need to increase its membership in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to rapid growth size of the communist party after the revolution. On the one hand, periodic “purges” were carried out, designed to free the party from a huge number of “adhering” pseudo-communists, on the other hand, the growth of the party was from time to time spurred on by mass recruitments, the most significant of which was the “Lenin appeal” in 1924, after the death of Lenin. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of the old, ideological, Bolsheviks among the young party members and not at all young neophytes. In 1927, out of 1 million 300 thousand people who were members of the party, only 8 thousand had pre-revolutionary experience.
Not only the intellectual and educational, but also the moral level of the party went down. Indicative in this regard are the results of the party purge carried out in the second half of 1921 with the aim of removing "kulak-proprietary and petty-bourgeois elements" from the party. Out of 732,000 members, only 410,000 members were left in the party (slightly more than half!). At the same time, a third of those expelled were expelled for passivity, another quarter - for "discrediting the Soviet government", "selfishness", "careerism", "bourgeois lifestyle", "decomposition in everyday life".
In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous post of secretary began to acquire more and more importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who, during official events, monitors compliance with the necessary formalities. Since April 1922, the Bolshevik Party had the post of general secretary. He connected the leadership of the secretariat of the Central Committee and the accounting and distribution department, which distributed lower-level party members to various positions. This post was given to Stalin.
Soon the expansion of the privileges of the upper stratum of party members began. Since 1926, this layer has received a special name - "nomenclature". So they began to call the party and state posts included in the list of posts, the appointment to which was subject to approval in the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee.
The processes of bureaucratization of the party and the centralization of power took place against the backdrop of a sharp deterioration in Lenin's health. Actually, the year of the introduction of the NEP became for him last year a fulfilling life. In May 1922, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so that the almost helpless Lenin was given a very sparing work schedule. In March 1923, there was a second attack, after which Lenin fell out of life for half a year, almost learning to pronounce words again. As soon as he began to recover from the second attack, in January 1924 there was a third and last one. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of his life, only one hemisphere of the brain was active in Lenin.
But between the first and second attacks, he still tried to participate in political life. Realizing that his days were numbered, he tried to draw the attention of the congress delegates to the most dangerous trend - the degeneration of the party. In his letters to the congress, known as his "political testament" (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposes to expand the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, to elect a new Central Control Commission from the proletarians, to cut down the excessively swollen and therefore incapacitated RCI ( Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate).
In the note “Letter to the Congress” (known as “Lenin’s Testament”) there was another component - the personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). Often this part of the Letter is interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not make a single fundamental decision without the Central Committee, and not so fundamental - without the Politburo, despite the fact that in The Central Committee, and even more so the Politburo, at that time was occupied by independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question of any "heir" (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a "testament"). Assuming that after him the party would continue to have a collective leadership, Lenin characterized the alleged members of this leadership, for the most part ambiguous. Only one definite indication was in his Letter: the post of general secretary gives Stalin too much power, dangerous in his rudeness (this was dangerous, according to Lenin, only in the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, and not in general). Some modern researchers believe, however, that "Lenin's testament" was based more on the psychological state of the patient than on political motives.
Even before Lenin's death, at the end of 1922, a struggle began between his "heirs", more precisely, the pushing of Trotsky from the helm. In the autumn of 1923, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed a letter to the Central Committee, in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later open letter a group of 46 old Bolsheviks (Statement 46) wrote in support of Trotsky. The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive refutation. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. This was not the first time that bitter disputes arose within the Bolshevik Party, but, unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted by reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labeling for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become more common as the political process develops in the 1920s.
The essence and purpose of the NEP. At the X Congress of the RCP (b) in March 1921, V.I. Lenin proposed a new economic policy. It was an anti-crisis program, the essence of which was to recreate a mixed economy and use the organizational and technical experience of the capitalists while maintaining the "commanding heights" in the hands of the Bolshevik government. They were understood as political and economic levers of influence: the absolute power of the RCP (b), government sector in industry, centralized financial system and monopoly of foreign trade.
The main political goal of the NEP is to relieve social tension and strengthen the social base of Soviet power in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants. Economic goal- to prevent further aggravation of the devastation, to overcome the crisis and restore the economy. The social goal is to provide favorable conditions for building a socialist society without waiting for the world revolution. In addition, the NEP was aimed at restoring normal foreign policy and foreign economic relations, at overcoming international isolation. The achievement of these goals led to the gradual curtailment of the NEP in the second half of the 1920s.
Implementation of the NEP. The transition to the NEP was legally formalized by decrees of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, decisions of the IX All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1921. The NEP included a set of economic and socio-political measures. They meant a "retreat" from the principles of "war communism" - the revival of private enterprise, the introduction of freedom of internal trade and the satisfaction of some of the demands of the peasantry.
The introduction of the NEP began with agriculture by replacing the surplus appropriation with a food tax (tax in kind). It was established before the sowing campaign, could not be changed during the year, and was 2 times less than the allocation. After the fulfillment of state deliveries, free trade in the products of their economy was allowed. The lease of land and the hiring of labor were allowed. The forcible planting of communes ceased, which made it possible for the private, small-scale commodity sector to gain a foothold in the countryside. Individual peasants provided 98.5% of agricultural products. The new economic policy in the countryside was aimed at stimulating agricultural production. As a result, by 1925, the gross grain harvest on the restored sown areas exceeded the average annual level of pre-war Russia by 20.7%. The supply of agricultural raw materials to industry has improved.
In production and trade, private individuals were allowed to open small and rent medium-sized enterprises. The decree on general nationalization was repealed. Large domestic and foreign capital was granted concessions, the right to create joint-stock and joint ventures with the state. Thus, a new state-capitalist sector emerged for the Russian economy. Strict centralization was canceled in the supply of enterprises with raw materials and distribution finished products. The activities of state enterprises aimed at greater independence, self-sufficiency and self-financing. Instead of a sectoral system of industrial management, a territorial-sectoral system was introduced. After the reorganization of the Supreme Council of National Economy, the leadership was carried out by its central boards through local economic councils (sovnarkhozes) and sectoral economic trusts.
In the financial sector, except for a single State Bank, there were private and cooperative banks, insurance companies. Payments were made for the use of transport, communication systems and utilities. Produced government loans, which were forcibly distributed among the population in order to pump out personal funds for the development of industry. In 1922, a monetary reform was carried out: the emission was reduced paper money, and the Soviet chervonets (10 rubles) was introduced into circulation, which was highly valued on the world currency market. This made it possible to strengthen the national currency and put an end to inflation. Evidence of the stabilization of the financial situation was the replacement of the tax in kind with its monetary equivalent.
As a result of the new economic policy in 1926, the main types of industrial products reached the pre-war level. Light industry developed faster than heavy industry, which required significant capital investments. living conditions in urban and rural population improved. The abolition of the food distribution rationing system has begun. Thus, one of the tasks of the NEP - overcoming the devastation - was solved.
The NEP brought about some changes in social policy. In 1922, a new Code of Labor Laws was adopted, which abolished general labor service and introduced free employment of labor. Labor mobilization has stopped. To stimulate the material interest of workers in increasing labor productivity, a reform of the wage system was carried out. Instead of remuneration in kind, a monetary system based on the tariff scale was introduced. However, social policy had a pronounced class orientation. In the election of deputies to government bodies, the workers still had the advantage. Part of the population, as before, was deprived of voting rights ("disenfranchised"). In the system of taxation, the main burden fell on private entrepreneurs in the city and kulaks in the countryside. The poor were exempted from paying taxes, the middle peasants paid half.
New trends in domestic politics have not changed the methods of political leadership of the country. State issues were still decided by the party apparatus. However, the socio-political crisis of 1920-1921. and the introduction of the NEP did not go unnoticed for the Bolsheviks. Among them, discussions began about the role and place of trade unions in the state, about the essence and political significance of the NEP. Factions appeared with their own platforms that opposed the position of V. I. Lenin. Some insisted on the democratization of the management system, granting broad economic rights to trade unions (the "workers' opposition"). Others proposed to further centralize management and virtually eliminate trade unions (L.D. Trotsky). Many communists left the RCP(b), believing that the introduction of the NEP meant the restoration of capitalism and a betrayal of socialist principles. The ruling party was threatened with a split, which, from the point of view of V.I. Lenin, absolutely unacceptable. At the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) resolutions were adopted condemning the "anti-Marxist" views of the "workers' opposition" and forbidding the creation of factions and groups. After the congress, a check was made on the ideological stability of the party members (“purge”), which reduced its membership by a quarter. All this made it possible to strengthen unanimity in the party and its unity as the most important link in the system of government.
The second link in the political system of Soviet power continued to be the apparatus of violence - the Cheka, renamed in 1922 into the Main Political Directorate. The GPU monitored the mood of all sectors of society, identified dissidents, sent them to prisons and concentration camps. Particular attention was paid to the political opponents of the Bolshevik regime. In 1922, the GPU accused 47 previously arrested leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party of counter-revolutionary activities. The first major political process under Soviet rule took place. The tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced 12 defendants to death, the rest to various terms of imprisonment. In the autumn of 1922, 160 scientists and cultural figures were expelled from Russia, who did not share the Bolshevik doctrine (“philosophical ship”). The ideological confrontation was over.
By implanting the Bolshevik ideology in society, the Soviet government dealt a blow to the Russian Orthodox Church and brought it under its control, despite the decree on the separation of church and state. In 1922, under the pretext of raising funds to fight the famine, a significant part of church property was confiscated. Anti-religious propaganda intensified, temples and cathedrals were destroyed. Priests began to be persecuted. Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest. In order to undermine intra-church unity, the government provided material and moral support to the “renovationist” currents, which urged the laity to obey the authorities. After Tikhon's death in 1925, the government prevented the election of a new patriarch. The locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, Metropolitan Peter, was arrested. His successor, Metropolitan Sergius, and 8 bishops were forced to show loyalty to the Soviet government. In 1927, they signed a Declaration in which they obliged priests who did not recognize the new government to withdraw from church affairs.
Strengthening the unity of the party, the defeat of political and ideological opponents made it possible to strengthen the one-party political system, in which the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry" in fact meant the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). This political system, with minor changes, continued to exist throughout the years of Soviet power.
Results of the domestic policy of the early 20s. NEP ensured the stabilization and restoration of the economy. However, soon after its introduction, the first successes gave way to new difficulties. Their occurrence was due to three reasons: the imbalance of industry and agriculture; purposefully class orientation of the internal policy of the government; strengthening contradictions between the diversity of social interests of different strata of society and the authoritarianism of the Bolshevik leadership.
The need to ensure the independence and defense of the country required the further development of the economy, primarily heavy industry. The priority of industry over agriculture resulted in the transfer of funds from the countryside to the city through price and tax policy. Sales prices for manufactured goods were artificially raised, and purchase prices for raw materials and products were lowered (“price scissors”). The difficulty of establishing a normal exchange of goods between the city and the countryside also gave rise to the unsatisfactory quality of industrial products. In the autumn of 1923, a sales crisis broke out, overstocking with expensive and poor manufactured goods, which the population refused to buy. In 1924, a price crisis was added to it, when the peasants, who had gathered a good harvest, refused to give grain to the state at fixed prices, deciding to sell it on the market. Attempts to force the peasants to hand over their grain at the tax in kind caused mass uprisings (in the Amur region, Georgia and other regions). In the mid-1920s, the volume of state procurements of grain and raw materials fell. This reduced the ability to export agricultural products and therefore reduced the foreign exchange earnings needed to buy industrial equipment from abroad.
To overcome the crisis, the government has taken a number of administrative measures. The centralized management of the economy was strengthened, the independence of enterprises was limited, prices for manufactured goods were increased, taxes were increased for private entrepreneurs, merchants and kulaks. This meant the beginning of the collapse of the NEP. The new direction of domestic policy was caused by the desire of the party leadership to accelerate the destruction of elements of capitalism by administrative methods, to resolve all economic and social difficulties in one blow, without developing a mechanism for interaction between the state, cooperative and private sectors of the economy. Its inability to overcome the crisis phenomena; The Stalinist leadership of the party explained economic methods and the use of command and directive methods by the activities of the class “enemies of the people” (Nepmen, kulaks, agronomists, engineers and other specialists). This served as the basis for the deployment of repressions and the organization of new political processes.
Intra-party struggle for power. The economic and socio-political difficulties that manifested themselves already in the first years of the NEP, the desire to build socialism in the absence of experience in realizing this goal gave rise to an ideological crisis. All the fundamental questions of the country's development provoked sharp inner-party discussions.
IN AND. Lenin, the author of the NEP, who in 1921 assumed that this would be a policy "in earnest and for a long time", a year later at the XI Party Congress declared that it was time to stop the "retreat" towards capitalism and it was necessary to move on to building socialism. He wrote a number of works called by Soviet historians V.I. Lenin. In them, he formulated the main directions of the party's activities: industrialization (technical re-equipment of industry), broad cooperation (primarily in agriculture) and cultural revolution (elimination of illiteracy, raising the cultural and educational level of the population). At the same time, V.I. Lenin insisted on maintaining the unity and leading role of the party in the state. In his “Letter to the Congress”, he gave very impartial political and personal characteristics to six members of the Politburo (L.D. Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev, N.I. Bukharin, G.L. Pyatakov, I. V. Stalin). IN AND. Lenin also warned the party against its bureaucratization and the possibility of a factional struggle, considered the main danger of the political ambitions and rivalry of L.D. Trotsky and I.V. Stalin.
The illness of V. I. Lenin, as a result of which he was removed from solving state-party affairs, and then his death in January 1924, complicated the situation in the party. Back in the spring of 1922, the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) was established. They became I.V. Stalin. He unified the structure of party committees at different levels, which led to the strengthening of not only intra-party centralization, but also the entire administrative-state system. I.V. Stalin concentrated enormous power in his hands, placing cadres loyal to him in the center and in the localities.
Different understanding of the principles and methods of socialist construction, personal ambitions (L.D. Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev and other representatives of the "old guard", who had significant Bolshevik pre-October experience), their rejection of Stalin's methods of leadership - all this caused opposition speeches in the Politburo of the party, in a number of local party committees, and in the press. Theoretical disagreements about the possibility of building socialism either in one country (V.I. Lenin, I.V. Stalin), or only on a global scale (L.D. Trotsky) were combined with the desire to occupy a leading position in the party and state. Pushing political opponents and skillfully interpreting their statements as anti-Leninist, I.V. Stalin consistently eliminated his opponents. L.D. Trotsky was expelled from the USSR in 1929. L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev and their supporters were repressed in the 30s. The first stone in the foundation of the cult of personality I.V. Stalin was laid in the course of internal party discussions of the 20s under the slogan of choosing the right, Leninist path of building socialism and establishing ideological unity.
The first attempts to curtail the NEP began. Syndicates in industry were liquidated, from which private capital was administratively ousted, and a rigid centralized system of economic management (commissariat of economics) was created. Stalin and his entourage headed for the forced seizure of grain and the forcible collectivization of the countryside. Repressions were carried out against managerial personnel (Shakhty case, the process of the Industrial Party, etc.). By the beginning of the 1930s, the NEP was effectively curtailed.
The volume of agricultural production decreased by 40% due to the depreciation of money and the shortage of manufactured goods.
Society has degraded, its intellectual potential has significantly weakened. Most of the Russian intelligentsia was destroyed or left the country.
Thus, the main task of the internal policy of the RCP (b) and the Soviet state was to restore the destroyed economy, create a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building socialism, promised by the Bolsheviks to the people.
The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over their bread, but also rose to armed struggle. The uprisings swept the Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, the Volga region and Siberia. The peasants demanded a change in agrarian policy, the elimination of the dictates of the RCP (b), the convening of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal equal suffrage. Units of the Red Army were sent to suppress these demonstrations.
Discontent spread to the army. On March 1, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan "For Soviets without Communists!" demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom of speech, meetings and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy , that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation. Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities stormed Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.
From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the city of Kronstadt:
Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army soldiers clearly see at the present moment that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and lead the republic out of the impasse...
The uprisings that swept across the country convincingly showed that the Bolsheviks were losing support in society. Already in the year there were calls to abandon the surplus appropriation: for example, in February 1920 Trotsky submitted a corresponding proposal to the Central Committee, but received only 4 votes out of 15; at about the same time, independently of Trotsky, the same question was raised by Rykov in the Supreme Council of National Economy.
The policy of war communism has exhausted itself, but Lenin, in spite of everything, persisted. Moreover - at the turn of 1920 and 1921 he resolutely insisted on strengthening this policy - in particular, plans were made for the complete abolition of the monetary system.
V. I. Lenin
Only by the spring of 1921 it became obvious that the general discontent of the lower classes, their armed pressure could lead to the overthrow of the power of the Soviets, led by the Communists. Therefore, Lenin decided to make a concession in order to maintain power.
Cooperation of all forms and types developed rapidly. The role of production cooperatives in agriculture was insignificant (in 1927 they provided only 2% of all agricultural products and 7% of marketable products), but the simplest primary forms - marketing, supply and credit cooperation - by the end of the 1920s covered more than half of all peasant farms. By the end of the year, various types of non-production cooperatives, primarily peasant cooperatives, covered 28 million people (13 times more than in the city). In the socialized retail trade, 60-80% accounted for the cooperative and only 20-40% - for the state proper, in industry in 1928, 13% of all products were produced by cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, insurance.
Instead of the depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of the Soviet signs, a new monetary unit was launched in the city - chervonets, which had a gold content and a gold exchange rate (1 chervonets \u003d 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles \u003d 7.74 g of pure gold). In the city, the Soviet signs, which were quickly supplanted by the chervonets, ceased to be printed altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; in the same year, the budget was balanced and the use of money emission to cover state expenses was prohibited; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On the foreign exchange market, both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 US dollar = 1.94 rubles).
The credit system has revived. In the city, the State Bank of the USSR was recreated, which began lending to industry and trade on a commercial basis. In 1922-1925. a number of specialized banks were created: joint-stock, in which the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, were shareholders, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; organized on the shares of the agricultural credit society, closed on the republican and central agricultural banks; mutual credit societies - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the savings of the population. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the share of the State Bank in the total credit investments of the entire banking system was 2/3. By October 1, 1926, the number of banks increased to 61, and the share of the State Bank in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.
economic mechanism during the NEP period was based on market principles. Commodity-money relations, which were previously tried to be banished from production and exchange, in the 1920s penetrated into all the pores of the economic organism, became the main link between its individual parts.
Discipline within the Communist Party itself was also tightened. At the end of 1920, an opposition group appeared in the party - the "workers' opposition", which demanded the transfer of all power in production to the trade unions. In order to stop such attempts, the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921 adopted a resolution on the unity of the party. According to this resolution, the decisions taken by the majority must be carried out by all members of the party, including those who do not agree with them.
The consequence of the one-party system was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in the party (Politburo) and state bodies (SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to make urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (VTsIK), but in the government - the Council of People's Commissars.
All these processes led to the fact that the actual position of a person, his authority played a greater role in the 1920s than his place in the formal structure of state power. That is why, speaking about the figures of the 1920s, we first of all name not positions, but surnames.
In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the rebirth of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be many more people wishing to join the ruling party than an underground party, membership in which cannot give other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling one, began to need to increase its membership in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to a rapid growth in the size of the Communist Party after the revolution. From time to time he was spurred on by mass sets, such as the "Lenin Set" after Lenin's death. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of the old, ideological, Bolsheviks among the young party members. In 1927, out of 1,300,000 people who were members of the party, only 8,000 had pre-revolutionary experience; most of the rest did not know the communist theory at all.
Not only the intellectual and educational, but also the moral level of the party went down. Indicative in this regard are the results of the party purge carried out in the second half of 1921 with the aim of removing "kulak-proprietary and petty-bourgeois elements" from the party. Of the 732,000 members, only 410,000 members remained in the party (slightly more than half!). At the same time, a third of those expelled were expelled for passivity, another quarter - for "discrediting the Soviet government", "selfishness", "careerism", "bourgeois lifestyle", "decomposition in everyday life".
In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous post of secretary began to acquire more and more importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who, during official events, monitors compliance with the necessary formalities. Since April, the Bolshevik Party has had the post of general secretary. He connected the leadership of the secretariat of the Central Committee and the accounting and distribution department, which distributed lower-level party members to various positions. This post was given to Stalin.
Soon the expansion of the privileges of the upper stratum of party members began. Since 1926, this layer has received a special name - "nomenclature". So they began to call the party and state posts included in the list of posts, the appointment to which was subject to approval in the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee.
The processes of party bureaucratization and centralization of power took place against the backdrop of a sharp deterioration in Lenin's health. Actually, the year of the introduction of the NEP was for him the last year of a full life. In May of the year, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so that the almost helpless Lenin was given a very sparing work schedule. In March of the year, a second attack occurred, after which Lenin fell out of life for half a year, almost learning to pronounce words anew. As soon as he began to recover from the second attack, in January the third and last happened. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of his life, only one hemisphere of the brain was active in Lenin.
But between the first and second attacks, he still tried to participate in political life. Realizing that his days were numbered, he tried to draw the attention of the congress delegates to the most dangerous trend - the degeneration of the party. In his letters to the congress, known as his "political testament" (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposes to expand the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, to elect a new Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) from the proletarians, to cut down the excessively swollen and therefore incapacitated RCI (Workers - peasant inspection).
There was another component in the "Lenin's Testament" - the personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). Often this part of the Letter is interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not make a single fundamental decision without the Central Committee, and not so fundamental - without the Politburo, despite the fact that in The Central Committee, and even more so the Politburo, at that time was occupied by independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question of any "heir" (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a "testament"). Assuming that after him the party would continue to have a collective leadership, Lenin characterized the alleged members of this leadership, for the most part ambiguous. Only one definite indication was in his Letter: the post of general secretary gives Stalin too much power, dangerous in his rudeness (this was dangerous, according to Lenin, only in the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, and not in general). Some modern researchers believe, however, that "Lenin's testament" was based more on the psychological state of the patient than on political motives.
But the letters to the congress reached its rank-and-file participants only in fragments, and the letter, in which comrades-in-arms were given personal characteristics, was not shown to the party at all by the inner circle. We agreed among ourselves that Stalin promised to improve, and that was the end of the matter.
Even before the physical death of Lenin, at the end of the year, a struggle began between his "heirs", more precisely, the pushing of Trotsky from the helm. In the fall of the year, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed a letter to the Central Committee, in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later, an open letter in support of Trotsky was written by a group of 46 old Bolsheviks ("Statement 46"). The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive refutation. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. It was not for the first time that sharp disputes arose in the Bolshevik Party. But unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted by reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labeling for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become more common as the political process develops in the 1920s.
Trotsky was defeated quite easily. The next party conference, held in January of the year, promulgated a resolution on the unity of the party (previously kept secret), and Trotsky was forced to silence. Until autumn. In the autumn of 1924, however, he published the book Lessons of October, in which he unequivocally stated that he made the revolution with Lenin. Then Zinoviev and Kamenev "suddenly" remembered that before the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) in July 1917, Trotsky had been a Menshevik. The party was in shock. In December 1924, Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar of the Navy, but left in the Politburo.
Since October 1928, the implementation of the first five year plan development of the national economy. At the same time, it was not the project developed by the USSR State Planning Committee that was adopted as a plan for the first five-year plan, but an overestimated version, drawn up by the Supreme Council of National Economy not so much taking into account objective possibilities, but under the pressure of party slogans. In June 1929, mass collectivization began (contradicting even the plan of the Supreme Council of National Economy) - it was carried out with the widespread use of coercive measures. In autumn, it was supplemented by forced grain procurements.
As a result of these measures, the unification into collective farms really acquired a mass character, which gave Stalin reason in November of the same 1929 to make a statement that the middle peasant went to the collective farms. Stalin's article was called that - "The Great Break". Immediately after this article, the next plenum of the Central Committee approved new, increased and accelerated plans for collectivization and industrialization.
The undoubted success of the NEP was the restoration of the destroyed economy, and, given that after the revolution, Russia lost highly qualified personnel (economists, managers, production workers), the success of the new government becomes a "victory over devastation." At the same time, the lack of those same highly qualified personnel has become the cause of miscalculations and errors.
It is believed that on March 21, 1921, our country passed to new form commodity and economic relations: it was on this day that a decree was signed ordering the abandonment of the surplus appropriation and proceeding to the collection of food tax. This is how the NEP started.
The Bolsheviks realized the need for economic cooperation, as the tactics of war communism and terror gave more and more negative effects, expressed in the strengthening of separatist phenomena on the outskirts of the young republic, and not only there.
When introducing a new economic policy, the Bolsheviks pursued a number of economic and political goals:
Today we will talk both about the essence of the new policy of the USSR government and discuss the main NEP. This topic is extremely interesting, since several years of the new economic course largely determined the features of the political and economic structure of the country for decades to come. However, far from the way the creators and founders of this phenomenon would like.
As is usually the case in our country, the NEP was introduced in a hurry, the haste with the adoption of decrees was terrible, no one had a clear plan of action. The determination of the most optimal and adequate methods for the implementation of the new policy was carried out practically throughout its entire length. Therefore, it is not surprising that it could not do without a large number trial and error. It is the same with economic "liberties" for the private sector: their list either expanded or narrowed almost immediately.
The essence of the NEP policy was that while maintaining their powers in politics and management of the Bolsheviks, the economic sector received more freedom, which made it possible to form market relations. In fact, the new politics can be seen as a form of authoritarian rule. As we already mentioned, this policy included a whole range of measures, many of which frankly contradicted each other (the reasons for this have already been mentioned above).
As for the political side of the issue, the NEP of the Bolsheviks was a classic autocracy, under which any dissent in this area was severely suppressed. In any case, deviations from the "central line" of the Party were certainly not welcomed. However, a rather bizarre fusion of elements of administrative and purely market methods of doing business was also observed in the economic sector:
Despite all of the above, you must clearly imagine that the reasons for the curtailment of the NEP largely lay in its origins. We will talk about them now.
The Bolsheviks made the most concessions to agrarians, cooperatives (at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, it was small producers who ensured the fulfillment of government orders), as well as to small industrialists. But here it should be clearly understood that the features of the NEP, which was conceived and which turned out as a result, are very different from each other.
So, in the spring of 1920, the authorities came to the conclusion that it was easiest to organize direct exchange of goods between the city and the countryside, simply exchanging equipment and other industrial products for food and other goods obtained in the countryside. Simply put, the NEP in Russia was originally conceived as another form of tax in kind, in which the peasants would be allowed to sell the surplus they had left.
So the authorities hoped to encourage the peasants to increase their crops. However, if you study these dates in the history of Russia, then the complete failure of such a policy becomes clear. People by that time preferred to sow as little as possible, not wanting to feed the horde of city dwellers without getting anything in return. It was not possible to convince the embittered peasants: by the end of the year it became extremely clear that no increase in grain was expected. For the times of the NEP to continue, some decisive steps were needed.
As a result, by winter, a terrible famine began, engulfing regions in which at least 30 million people lived. About 5.5 million died of starvation. More than two million orphans appeared in the country. To provide industrial centers with bread, at least 400 million poods of bread were required, and there simply were not so many.
Using the most cruel methods, they managed to collect only 280 million from the already "ragged" peasants. As you can see, two seemingly completely opposite strategies had very similar features: the NEP and war communism. A comparison of them shows that in both cases the peasants in the countryside were often forced to give away the entire crop for free.
Even the most ardent supporters of war communism admitted that further attempts to rob the villagers would not lead to anything good. increased greatly. By the summer of 1921, it became crystal clear that a real expansion of the population was needed. Thus, communism and the NEP (at the initial stage) are much more closely connected than many imagined.
By the autumn of that year, when a third of the country was on the verge of a terrible famine, the Bolsheviks made their first serious concessions: at last, the medieval trade turnover that had bypassed the market was abolished. In August 1921, a decree was issued, on the basis of which the economy of the NEP was to function:
In order to ensure the normal maintenance of commodity-money relations, the State Bank was created in 1921, cash desks were opened for issuing loans and receiving savings, and compulsory payment for travel to public transport, utilities and telegraph. Has been completely restored tax system. In order to strengthen and fill the state budget, many costly items were deleted from it.
All further financial reform was aimed strictly at strengthening national currency. So, since 1922, the issue of a special currency, the Soviet chervonets, was launched. In fact, it was an equivalent (including in terms of gold content) replacement for the imperial ten. This measure had a very positive effect on confidence in the ruble, which soon gained recognition abroad.
¼ new currency backed by precious metals, some foreign currencies. The remaining ¾ were provided by bills of exchange, as well as some goods of high demand. It should be noted that the government strictly forbade paying off the budget deficit with chervonets. They were intended exclusively to secure the operations of the State Bank, to carry out certain foreign exchange transactions.
You need to clearly understand one simple thing: the new government has never (!) Set itself the goal of building some kind of market state full private property. This is confirmed by the well-known words of Lenin: "We do not recognize anything frequent ...". He constantly demanded from his associates to tightly control economic processes, so that the NEP in the USSR was never really independent. It was because of the absurd administrative and party pressure that the new policy did not give even half of the positive results that could have been expected otherwise.
In general, the NEP and war communism, which are often compared by some authors in the purely romantic aspect of the new policy, were extremely similar, no matter how strange it may seem. Of course, they were especially similar in the initial period of the deployment of economic reforms, but even later common features could be traced without much difficulty.
Already by 1922, Lenin declared that further concessions to the capitalists should be completely stopped, that the times of the NEP had passed. Reality corrected these aspirations. Already in 1925, the maximum permitted number of employees in peasant farms was increased to one hundred people (previously - no more than 20). Kulak cooperation was legalized, landowners could lease their allotments for up to 12 years. Bans on the creation of credit partnerships were lifted, and exit from communal farms (cuts) was completely allowed.
But already in 1926, the Bolsheviks embarked on a policy aimed at curtailing the NEP. Many of the permits that the people received a year ago have been completely cancelled. The kulaks again came under attack, so that small industries were almost completely buried. The pressure on private business executives was inexorably growing both in the city and in the countryside. Many results of the NEP were practically nullified due to the fact that the country's leadership did not have enough experience and unanimity in matters of political and economic reforms.
Despite all the measures taken, the contradictions in the social and economic sphere became more and more serious. It was necessary to decide what to do next: to continue to act by purely economic methods, or to curtail the NEP and return to the methods of war communism.
As we already know, the supporters of the second method, headed by I. V. Stalin, won. In order to neutralize the consequences of the grain harvest crisis in 1927, a number of administrative measures were taken: the role of the administrative center in the management of the economic sector was again significantly strengthened, the independence of all enterprises was practically abolished, and prices for manufactured goods were significantly increased. In addition, the authorities resorted to increasing taxes, all the peasants who did not want to hand over their bread were tried. During the arrests, a complete confiscation of property and livestock was carried out.
So, only in the Volga region more than 33 thousand peasants were arrested. Archives show that about half of them lost all their property. Almost all agricultural machinery, which had been acquired by that time by some large farms, was forcibly confiscated in favor of collective farms.
Studying these dates in the history of Russia, one can see that it was in those years that lending to small industries was completely stopped, which led to very negative consequences in the economic sector. These events were held throughout the country, sometimes reaching the point of absurdity. In 1928-1929. large-scale farms began curtailing production, selling off livestock, implements and machinery. The blow inflicted on large farms for political purposes, to demonstrate the alleged futility of individual farming, undermined the foundations of the productive forces in the country's agrarian sector.
So, what are the reasons for the curtailment of the NEP? This was facilitated by the deepest internal contradictions in the leadership of the young country, which were only exacerbated by attempts to use the usual, but ineffective methods to stimulate economic development USSR. Ultimately, even a radical increase in administrative pressure on private traders did not help, who by that time no longer saw any special prospects in the development of their own production.
It must be understood that the NEP was not curtailed in a couple of months: in the agricultural sector, this happened already at the end of the 20s, industry was out of work around the same period, and trade lasted until the early 30s. Finally, in 1929, a resolution was adopted to speed up the socialist development of the country, which predetermined the decline of the NEP era.
The main reasons for the curtailment of the NEP are that the Soviet leadership, wanting to quickly build new model social structure, provided that the country was surrounded by capitalist states, it turned out to be forced to resort to excessively harsh and extremely unpopular methods.
